AQUILA Magazine Earth Issue plus resources | Page 18

We all know that plastic is having a long-term effect on the planet , especially the stuff that can only be used once , and the stuff that cannot be recycled . The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes there is simply no way of getting rid of it after we ’ ve thrown it away . Plastic has been found in the stomachs of countless sea creatures , and tiny pieces of plastic , called microplastics , have even been found in the deepest parts of our oceans .

Yikes . Ed .
Yikes is right , and it ’ s not just plastic . Some scientists now think the human impact on our planet has been so massive in recent years that we should name a new epoch : the Anthropocene .
OK , but what is an epoch ?
The idea of naming a new epoch to describe the changes humans have caused is a BIG one . The hope is that doing so might cause a shift in the way we all view our role in climate change .
MID-CENTURY mAdness
No one has yet decided when the Anthropocene started . Geologists are looking for markers in the rock record ( all the rocks that currently exist ) to show when human activity became so intense that it changed the planet for good . There are many potential markers , one good example is the atomic age of the mid-twentieth century , when radioactive debris from nuclear testing left radioisotopes in the atmosphere .
ARCHAEOLOGY CALLING
This exploration of the modern-day is happening in a lot of different fields of study , not just geology . The punk archaeology movement began in 2008 , when a small group of archaeologists including William R . Caraher and Kostis Kourelis discovered that they shared an interest in the music and culture of punk . They use punk ideas , working outside the boundaries of what is expected , to examine things that might not normally be looked at from an archaeological point of view ; things like video games .
DIG ATARI
A brilliant example of this can be seen in the excavation of a rubbish dump in New Mexico in 2014 . These archaeologists had evidence that somewhere underneath all the rubbish was a load of unused video games mysteriously disposed of by the company Atari , in 1983 . This involved a huge number of copies of an E . T . video game . Many of the video game cartridges that they found are now on display in museums , others belong to game collectors who wanted to own a piece of gaming history .
I see you ’ re awake today . Good question .
In order to study and compare the geological and environmental events that have happened on our planet , scientists have given names to different periods of time . These periods are measured on the geologic time scale ( GTS ) and are divided first into eons , then into eras , periods , epochs and ages . You may have heard the name of some periods , for example the Cretaceous , Jurassic and Triassic periods , when the dinosaurs were alive . We currently live in the Holocene epoch , which began at the end of the last major ice age , just under 12,000 years ago .
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